


sing another summer song

by indigostohelit



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 09:05:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7041838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's not a lot to do, when you're a half-broken stormtrooper who's already told the rebels all they can use. The doctors say he needs to be outside, see the sun, get fresh air; talk to people, they don't say, but Finn hears it when the door's shut and they think he's sleeping.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sing another summer song

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains a character kissing another character while drunk, as well as self-objectification.

In the spring Finn goes to the gardens. He's using a crutch, still; his legs won't work like they used to. There's a tightness when he tries to move too quickly or step too hard, a sharp pain spiderwebbing out through his hips and his knees.

It'll get easier, the doctors say, and Finn believes them. He's beginning to suspect, though, that it's not so much a matter of regaining his old movements as learning to work with his new ones. Retraining himself like he's a cadet again, how to run, how to jump, how to stand.

The gardens don't quite deserve the name. They're not so much ordered rows as overgrowths: tiny-petalled yellow flowers with roots as thick as fingers dig into stones, jagged-leafed clovers huddle by the feet of broken pillars, vines so dark they're almost blue cling to the mortar between bricks. Broken walls; scattered parts of roofs. Stone circles where buildings once stood.

Not quite gardens, no. Finn's only seen stone buildings once before, in Maz Kanata's sprawling complex, and he doesn't think these scattered bricks and old foundations were meant to be anything like Maz's palace.

The doctors say that the gardens were like this when the Resistance came here, that the gardens were like this when the Empire lived here before that. A lost civilization, then, a remnant of a different world.

But of course Finn never really _will_ know.

There's not a lot to do, when you're a half-broken stormtrooper who's already told the rebels all they can use. The doctors say he needs to be outside, see the sun, get fresh air; _talk to people_ , they don't say, but Finn hears it when the door's shut and they think he's sleeping.

So the gardens will do. They're longer than they are wide; in the early days Finn would measure his progress by how far he could walk, whether he could make it four steps past the old tree spreading branches through a torn-up roof, whether he could make it ten. Today he can walk all the way to the end and back, and have his face smoothed into a painless smile by the time the doctors can see him again.

There's one building in particular that he likes. It's still nearly complete – Finn doesn't know how, after all these years and all these governments – and it's tall enough that he's given himself a crick in his neck more than a few times, trying to see the top. It's made of pale stone, grey-beige, and it has eight sides in total. Weeks ago, when each step was a careful battle of strength and timing and balance, he made a game out of counting them.

He never has seen the top of the roof – too high – but it's held up by pillars, two on each side and one on each corner. Twenty-four in total, and Finn made a game out of counting those, too. And each pillar is different: this one speckled with orange, that one laced with veins of yellow and lighter grey, that one cracked and rust-brown, that one pockmarked as if hit with heavy stones. The doctors, when Finn asks, say they're thought to represent all the seasons on this planet.

Finn thinks they're probably telling the truth. For one thing, he can't think of any situation where they'd need to lie to him about this. For another, though he himself only counts two seasons on this planet, he can imagine the people who once lived here splitting spring into a dozen gleaming fragments, like a mirror.

He wonders how many seasons they have on the planet where Rey is.

“Probably not so many,” he tells her, watching a green-winged spider flutter its way down the foundation that holds the pillars up. “How many'd they have on Jakku? Hot and Sandy all year round, or did you folks get Hot and Muddy, too?”

In his head, he imagines Rey smacking his arm, or rolling his eyes, or making a face at him. _We had plenty of seasons_ , she tells him. Or – _Don't be ridiculous, you saw that planet, do you think there was ever any rain?_ Or even: _Why do you want to know about Jakku, honestly, I thought you hated the place_.

“I did,” he says, and, “I do,” and, “Nothing good ever came out of that scrap heap – ”

– _except?_ she demands in his head, and he makes an innocent face.

“Except... BB-8?”

_You_ – he imagines her saying, and elbowing him, and laughing. And he'd sling an arm around her shoulder, and –

– his back twinges, sending a ripple of pain through his legs, and Finn grips at the crutch until he can feel his pulse in his knuckles.

One of the doctors has been teaching him a little of the droid dialect that BB-8 uses. His vestibular folds are the wrong shape to speak it in any kind of understandable way, but he whistles and beeps to himself, quietly, under his breath: _one. Two. Three. Four limerick oysters. Five corpulent porpoises. Six pair of Don Alverzo's tweezers._

The pain recedes.

He breathes in, out. Flexes his fingers and toes until the nausea rises and passes.

Then he pushes himself to his feet, slowly – calves, then knees, then thighs, then hips, then, cautiously and patiently, the straightening of the back – and makes his way across the gardens to the gleaming hallways of the residential wing.

It's not just residential, or not any more. For one thing, the top brass doesn't live there; most of them are scattered across the planet, safely spread out. For another, half the labs are there, for any refugee academic or burnt-out medic whose worms are due to expire five hours after sundown. Whoever takes care of zoning, a doctor told Finn, set things up that way after the third explosion.

Finn's still not sure what they expect him to do with that information.

It's the lab wing that's next to the gardens, and so it's through the labs that Finn goes, a three-legged _click-click-CLANG_ that echoes down the hallways for what must be ages. Finn appreciates that, at least, appreciates the unsubtlety of it. Here comes the stormtrooper; everyone to your places.

Out of the labs, and through more and yet more hallways, and finally a left and a right. A thumbscan – no beep, he must have left his room unlocked when he went outside – and he's easing himself down onto the thick little cot, reaching out with one hand for the medication on his side table.

“Hey to you too, buddy,” says a voice next to him, and Finn startles, badly. The pill bottle hits the floor and spills.

“Oh, pfassk,” Poe says, and dives for the floor. “No – stay there, stay there, _stars_ these are strong. They gave you the good stuff! Who'd you bribe, huh?”

“Hey,” says Finn, too late, and despite Poe's warning maneuvers himself carefully to the floor to collect the little blue pills rolling into the mattress. “Sorry. Uh. Kylo Ren asked for a lot, but I managed to bargain him down.”

Poe looks horrified. Finn stills – _hell_ – and coughs, pulls the bottle out of Poe's hand.

“Sorry,” he says again. “I've been – busy.”

“I haven't even yelled at you for not coming and talking to me yet,” says Poe, and smiles at him big and warm. “Slow down, hey?”

“Hey,” says Finn, and returns the smile shakily.

“What I was _planning_ on,” says Poe, “is asking you to dinner. Me and Jessika and Karé and Snap and a few of the squad. We never see you in the mess hall.”

“There's a mess hall?” Finn says.

Poe slaps a hand over his heart. “They never told you there was a mess hall? Finn, my friend, you have so much to _learn_. You have so much to _eat_.”

“Oh,” says Finn, and keeps smiling. “That sounds – great.”

Finn can hear the conversation and laughter of the mess hall from ages away. He stomps a little harder than he needs to, on the hard hallway floors: _clack-clack-CLONG, clack-clack-CLONG,_ all the way down the hall.

When he arrives, not a single person gives him a startled or wary look, and he feels his chest fill up with something steady and warm. No wonder these are the people the First Order can't kill, if they have game faces like this. How many of them are trained as spies? How many of them are able to hide their uncertainty or fear naturally?

He recognizes Snap Wexley at the table, and no one else, though Poe only introduces him to a few – Oddy Muva, Nien Nunb – and he assumes he's expected to have met the rest. They all know him, of course, and he's besieged by handshakes and grins and very gentle backslaps.

And when it comes down to it it's not so different from any other mess hall Finn's sat down in; there's a lot of laughter, a lot of mocking of the officers, a lot of jokes – some crude but none rude, Finn notices, none aimed at anyone who doesn't immediately lob back a witty retort with a grin or a wink. They ask him how he's doing, how medical was, which doctors are his favorite, how well he can understand Binary. They feed him bits of their different meals, laugh at him when he makes a face at some twitching mushroom or grey slop that smells like soap. They smile at him, joke with him, ask him how he likes dinner.

“Well, it's no First Order gruel,” says Finn, leaning back and putting his hands on his full stomach, “but it'll do.”

There's a brief silence. Poe says, “Jessika, you look _glowing_ , I heard your bunk was empty last night,” and Finn wouldn't notice that his voice is half an octave too high if he weren't listening for it.

“So they had their try,” he tells Rey the next day, “or Poe had his try, I don't know if it was all of their ideas or just his.”

_Don't be ridiculous_ , Rey says in his head, _they'll ask you back_.

The Rey in his head always skips past all the things he's not saying. Finn makes a face, imagines the two of them sitting together on this overturned stone, watching the sun glint off the pillars.

The doctors say there's an inscription, somewhere on the building. They say once Finn can read the inscription, they'll know he's healed.

Finn doesn't know what that means. He hasn't found the inscription.

“Yeah,” he says, scratching at the back of his neck. “No. I dunno.”

_Of course they will_ , Rey scolds, _you think anyone's scared away from anything by one joke that didn't turn out like you wanted it to?_

He's quiet, and she adds, a laugh in her voice, _That how they did it in the First Order? Line you up to tell jokes to Snoke, first one he doesn't laugh at, they use him for target practice?_

Finn snickers to himself; the noise startles him, suddenly, and he's for a long cold moment aware of how he looks: a muscled man with a cane, sitting on a rock, staring at space and chuckling at nothing at all.

Poe does invite him to dinner again, that night, and Snap the next, and Jessika after that. Their days are filled with training, Finn learns – with most of the Republic turned to ash, there's fewer missions to run, less to defend and protect. They run drills, set up practice battles against each other, patrol their own airspace. Dinner is the only time they have to relax.

Finn relaxes, too. Deliberately.

He joins their jokes. He laughs when he's meant to. He asks them about their days, their social circles, their love lives. When no one invites him to dinner on the fifth night, he comes without an invitation, and is greeted with smiles and arm-punches at the table.

That night, Poe follows him back to his room. He's had some Corellian wine, and his cheeks are pink.

“Can I come in?” he says.

Finn steps aside, waves his hands in what he hopes is an ironically dramatic gesture.

There's nowhere to sit in his room, really. Finn watches Poe glance panickedly around the floor before he laughs, slaps the bed. “Sit down, Poe.”

“If you're sure,” says Poe, and settles onto the cot, wrapping his arms around his knees.

“Finn,” he says. “Can I talk to you? About a thing?”

“Of course,” says Finn blankly.

“So,” Poe says. “So. So when I was a kid I lived on Yavin 4, right. With my dad and. My mom?”

“Uh-huh,” says Finn. He shifts his body deliberately so it's facing Poe, puts his hands on the bed so they're not crossed over his chest. This seems like it's going to be a particular type of conversation.

“And they were both rebel soldiers,” says Poe, “and they quit the war, a little, to raise me. But they never – and my dad talked about it a lot, and my mom a little, so I joined up, eventually.”

“Right,” says Finn, nods, makes understanding eye contact.

“And I knew Luke Skywalker, a bit,” Poe says, “and Ben, you know Ben.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I mean. I did know Ben.”

Finn doesn't break eye contact, but a cold feeling is gathering in his stomach, slow, like the nausea after pain.

“So what I'm telling you is,” says Poe. “If you ever want to – to talk about it. The First Order, or anything.” He grabs for Finn's hands; Finn lets them be held, feels them cold and far away in Poe's hot, tight grip.

“I'm here for you,” Poe says, sincere. “And – Jessika and – and all of us. We really like you, Finn, we care – ” His cheeks get pinker. “But. Me. I care a lot, okay, Finn?”

Finn thinks, _I already tried to talk about it_.

He doesn't think that was the kind of talking about it Poe meant.

“Thanks,” he says, instead. “Thank you, Poe. That means a lot to me.”

“All right,” says Poe. He pauses, stares at Finn – and then, quick as a bird, darts in and plants a kiss on the corner of Finn's mouth.

“I'm sorry,” he says, immediately. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I shouldn't've, that wasn't what I meant.”

“I,” says Finn, and blinks. He doesn't have the handbook for this. “I. Don't be. Don't be sorry.”

Poe looks up at him with wide eyes, and Finn's stomach feels like ice. He meant that like it sounded, is the problem. He did.

He kisses Poe, because he's not sure what else to do.

“Oh,” says Poe, and closes his eyes, and leans into him. His mouth is as warm as the rest of him; Finn cups his cheek with one hand, feels in a numb, removed sort of way the burn of Poe's stubble, the scrape of it on his own cheeks. Poe's shoulders, wide and solid and strong. Poe's breath on his lips.

He pulls away.

Poe's cheeks are darker than ever. “Oh,” he says.

“Oh,” says Finn. He remembers at the last second to make it teasing, and to smile.

_Oh, Finn_ , says Rey in his head, quiet and terribly, terrifyingly sad.

Finn's smile does not crack.

“I think,” Poe says, “I may have had too much to drink.” His face is glowing with joy. “I'll see you tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” says Finn, “yeah,” and doesn't let his smile fade until Poe is out of the room.

Then he picks up his crutch and hobbles, slowly, out of the building.

He falls halfway across the gardens.

It's not a bad fall, and not even his own fault; he puts his crutch on a patch of mud and it slides out from under him, lands him on his tailbone in a patch of clover. But he twists his back a little when he does it, and he has to lay his head down, squeeze his eyes shut, let the ringing in his ears ease and fade.

When he opens his eyes, he's looking at the eight-sided building with the pillars. The very bottom of the foundation has an inscription on it. It's too low for him to see standing up; he'd have to lay down like this, or crouch low, in a way that he just can't do with his cane and his pain-webbed back.

Night fell hours ago, and lights are still bursting in front of Finn's eyes. He blinks until they fade, blinks until the swimming blurriness collects at the corners and doesn't spill.

The inscription reads:

WHO MADE ME?

THE THIRTEENTH KING OF THIS COUNTRY MADE ME.

WHAT AM I MADE OF?

SANDSTONE AND PERMACRETE AM I MADE FROM.

HOW AM I TO BE USED?

There the inscription vanishes into the earth.

Finn lies there, panting, for a few more minutes. Then he pushes himself to his feet – calves, knees, thighs, hips, back, all parts aligned and functioning – and limps across the gardens, into General Organa's quarters.

She answers her own door, when he knocks, and doesn't look surprised to see him. “Come in,” she says. “Have a seat.”

There are chairs in her room – multiple. She sits at one by her desk, enormous and covered with papers; Finn sits in the one closest to the door.

“I did tell you everything,” he says to her, staring at the wall. “About the First Order. Everything I knew.”

“I believed you when you said you did,” she says calmly.

He doesn't have the energy to fake surprise. “Then why the squadron? Why – why Poe? If not to soften me up, get me relaxed and – and friendly, and talkative?”

“Have you considered,” she asks, still mild, “that they talk to you because they like you?”

He's silent. She says, “Do you not like them?”

“No,” he says. “I like them a lot.”

She blinks at him slowly, like a cat. “Well. I suspect that may be what they call friendship, Finn. Possibly even friendship without conditions.”

Finn meets her eyes for a brief second, has to glance away. Then he says, “I've been talking to Rey, I think.”

General Organa goes still. “Have you.”

“I thought,” he says, and shakes his head. “I thought it was me, talking to myself. I think it was that – at first. Something's different now. It's not just me making it up.”

“That would certainly be an interesting development,” says General Organa. He can hear the tremble behind the careful neutrality of her voice, see the light dancing in her eyes. He loves her, suddenly, for it.

“That could be useful,” he says. “Couldn't it?”

General Organa looks at him and smiles, slow and sad.

“Yes, Finn,” she says. “We could use that.”

“All right, then,” says Finn. “All right.”


End file.
